Credit where credit is due.

Georgia GOP Senate nominee Herschel Walker smiles during remarks during a campaign stop at Battle Lumber Co. on Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022, in Wadley, Ga. Walker's appearance was his first following reports that a woman who said Walker paid for her 2009 abortion is actually mother of one of his children - undercutting Walker's claims he didn't know who she was .

Let’s hear it for Connecticut Republicans who, in this election cycle, have managed to avoid resembling their national counterparts.

Let us stipulate that neither political party has cornered the market on virtue or vice. Democrats of my generation often hypnotize themselves into forgetting the details of Chappaquiddick. Juanita Broaddick’s rape allegations against Bill Clinton check more credibility boxes than do Christine Blasey Ford’s against Brett Kavanaugh. Also, despite the fact that Hunter Biden is not running for anything, there is Hunter Biden, who has, as of the most recent counting, made 3,844 errors in judgment and put all of them on one laptop (3,845) which he brought to a repair shop (3,846) despite the fact that there allegedly were homemade pornography files visible on the desktop (3,847) and then never bothered to pick up the repaired machine or pay the $85 bill (3,848).

Even so, the national GOP has had itself a week .

The star player was probably Herschel Walker, former football (and bobsledding) star now running for U.S. Senate from Georgia. Walker has campaigned as a Christian family values, anti-abortion candidate.

As most people know, The Daily Beast has been reporting on the claims of an unnamed woman who says Walker paid for her abortion of a fetus conceived by him. The woman also says she has a child by Walker.

Walker has one son by his now ex-wife. He also has three other children with three other women. And then there’s this abortion thing.

Ironically, the worst condemnation of Walker may have come from Christian Walker, his son by the ex-wife. Christian Walker is (checks notes) a former high school competitive cheerleading star and a Black gay MAGA Republican. I’m going out on a limb and saying he is the only person with that LinkedIn profile.

Christian Walker went on the warpath Monday when the latest allegations broke. One of his tweets: “I know my mom and I would really appreciate if my father Herschel Walker stopped lying and making a mockery of us. You’re not a ‘family man’ when you left us to bang a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months running from your violence.”

You almost have to take a sick day to keep up with the details of this story, made fuzzier by Walker’s manner or speaking about them, to say nothing of the way everybody else talks.  

I wasted precious minutes of my Herschel sick day investigating a quote by conservative talk show host and former NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch, who supposedly said “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate.”

I had assumed this came from a parody website such as The Onion, but, no, Loesch actually said that. I want to stress that there is no evidence of Walker paying for baby eagle abortions. I’m not even sure what that would consist of. An omelet?

Hats off to Loesch for admitting that picking up Senate seats is way more important than moral consistency. We need more of that plain talk. It beats the equivocations of Pastor Anthony George, who leads a 1,300-member Atlanta congregation and who, like many Georgia evangelicals, is staying the course with Walker.

“The dilemma is, do you wait for a candidate who is perfect?” George told Politico on Wednesday. “Do you wait for a candidate who perfectly aligns with everything you not only want them to do when they’re elected, but all of your cultural and moral beliefs?”

Exactly. It goes back to that old saying, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the weird and disgusting.”

Thursday dawned with Walker appearing on "The Hugh Hewitt Show." The two of them engaged in a theologically complex discussion of forgiveness.

Walker: “I know nothing about any woman having an abortion. And they can keep coming at me like that, and they’re doing it because they want to distract people. I know that, because you know, I’ve already been forgiven. And if I’ve been forgiven, why in the world would I not be forgiven of something like that? And I’m not going to have been forgiven.”     

Hewitt followed up with a question about whether Walker needed forgiveness for anything “vis-à-vis” the unnamed woman.

No, said Walker, “…and had that happened, I would have said it, because it’s nothing to be ashamed of there.”    

A few hours later, in a press scrum, Walker was asked about that comment and denied saying it. I watched the exchange several times, and I’m convinced he really believes that.

At the same press event, Walker was asked about the Daily Beast article in which the unnamed woman said Walker paid for her abortion and subsequently fathered a carried-to-term child with her.

“Because of the article, I had more kids. That’s why I haven’t reached out to anyone, because I said no,” Walker said.

I was starting to see the challenge of covering Walker’s campaign. I’m pretty sure he meant that the article imputed to him one more child. A fifth offspring, conceived with a fifth woman. As opposed to the article itself causing him to run out and impregnate an unspecified number of people.

In the interest of fairness, let me note that Walker’s opponent, incumbent U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, a pastor, has been accused by his ex-wife of running over her foot with his car, not doing his share with the kids under their joint custody agreement and running away from a process server.

Police found no evidence of the first charge, presumably after examining the ex-wife’s foot, which is where most of the evidence would be. The third charge appears to be true, although it’s less clear to me with each passing day whether something like running away from a process server is outside the bounds of propriety. I feel duty-bound to tell you the process server’s name was/is Frank Swindle.

This whole mess unfolded Monday, simultaneous with a story on the news site Jezebel which uncovered a whistleblower report about a research lab run by Mehmet Oz, Republican candidate for Senate from Pennsylvania.        

Oz’s lab was depicted as something out of an especially cruel and grisly Stephen King novel. A sample: The whistleblower claimed “one Oz-led study resulted in a litter of puppies being killed by intracardiac injection with syringes of expired drugs inserted in their hearts without any sedation. Upon being killed, the puppies were allegedly left in a garbage bag with living puppies who were their littermates.”

The article noted that there was no literal puppy blood on Oz’s hands but that, as the principal investigator, he kind of did have puppy blood, once removed, on his hands.

Oz’s political chances are probably damaged even more by his failure to actually live in Pennsylvania, but still, it’s a heckuva week when puppy-killing is not the top abomination story.

A few days before that, Donald Trump attacked Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for cooperating with President Joe Biden on a bill to keep the government funded through December.

“He has a DEATH WISH," Trump wrote on his social media platform. “Must immediately seek help and advise [sic] from his China loving wife, Coco Chow!"

McConnell’s wife is Elaine Chao, Trump’s former transportation secretary. So that’s a death threat and a racist slur.

You can barely expect any coverage of something that tame in the current environment.

Now, if you’ll forgive me, I have a baby eagle omelet cooling on the sideboard. Why in the world would I not be forgiven of something like that?     

Colin McEnroe’s column appears every Sunday, his newsletter comes out every Tuesday and you can hear his radio show every weekday on WNPR 90.5. Email him at colin@ctpublic.org. Sign up for his free newsletter at http://bit.ly/colinmcenroe.

Colin McEnroe is allergic to penicillin and hosts the daily WNPR show, The Colin McEnroe Show and co-hosts The Wheelhouse, a weekly WNPR political roundtable. He wrote weekly newspaper columns for the Hartford Courant for more than three decades.

He is the author of three books (all out of print and converted into packing materials) and one play; and his work has appeared on The New York Times op-ed page and in Mirabella, Best Life, Cosmopolitan, New Woman, Forbest FYI and Mademoiselle.

In 2018, he returned to Yale, his alma mater, to teach in the Political Science department. His books, columns, magazine articles and radio shows have won numerous prestigious awards, which he is far too modest to mention.